Reference to Motion Events in Six Western Austronesian Languages: Toward a Semantic Typology

Abstract

The language of motion events is a system used to specify the motion of objects through space with respect to other objects. Recent research has shown that languages differ in the relative saliency of manner or path they focus on in motion event descriptions. These can be thought of as different strategies dedicated to specifying the spatial relationship between objects in motion and the landmark object. We propose a four-way typology based on the narrative data from six western Austronesian languages. Evidence is presented that each of the languages examined typically has a preferred strategy for describing motion events and that each has a distinct narrative style. These six languages are shown to share the commonality of giving greater attention to path information in motion events. Path salience in the encoding of motion clauses appears to exhibit a strong diachronic stability, suggesting that Proto-Austronesian was probably also a path-salient language.

Universal Development and L1–L2 Convergence in Bilingual Construal of Manner in Speech and Gesture in Mandarin, Japanese, and English

“…In verb‐framed Japanese, speakers may use a range of devices to encode manner, including monomorphemic and compound verbs as well as adverbials; however, again as predicted, explicit encoding of manner in speech is much less frequent in Japanese than in English (Brown & Chen, ; Brown & Gullberg, ; although see Allen et al, , where levels of mention of manner in Japanese may be comparable to those in English in elicited descriptions of purpose‐designed stimuli in which manner and path are equally salient). Studies of equipollently framed Mandarin have described patterns that are generally in line with satellite‐framed languages such that speakers lexicalize manner in verbs, though often in serial verb constructions, and frequently encode manner explicitly in speech (Brown & Chen, ; Chen & Guo, ; Chui, , ; Guo & Chen, ; Huang & Tanangkingsing, ).…”

An Empirical Study of Motion Expressions in Mandarin Chinese

“…They emphasise the importance of contexts on the manifestation of typological differences and call for "relevant parameters of language differences" (Naigles et al, 1998, p. 548). And interestingly, some researchers (Huang & Tanangkingsing, 2005) propose a four-way typology based on Talmy's two-way typology. The vertical axis represents Path salience and the horizontal axis represents Manner salience.…”

Two Ontological Approaches to Building an Intergrated Semantic Network for Yami ka-Verbs

“…According to the study by Huang and Tanangkingsing [5], examining six Western Austronesian languages, path information is given more attention in these languages. As a result, they claimed that the Proto-Austronesian language was probably a path-salient language.…”